We call them GIGs

LIghter shade of green:
These CFC "swirly" bulbs can reduce the carbon footprint of your home, but Dan Cristol and Sharon Zuber know the swirly bulbs also contain mercury and--unless they're recycled--lose a large portion of their environmental friendliness.

Every other Monday, behind closed doors, a group of people
huddle over a platter of sandwiches in Millington Hall to discuss and
refine their plans to disperse mercury throughout the College of
William and Mary.

Relax. These folks want to spread mercury throughout the
curriculum, not the campus environment. They’re participants in a GIG,
or Global Inquiry Group, a new type of program at the College that
combines research, interdisciplinary collaboration and an international
component. The mercury group is one of two new s-GIGs, or sustained
GIGs.

“If we’re successful, we will reach every student at William and
Mary,” said Dan Cristol, associate professor of biology. “In two years,
every student here will come to the conclusion that mercury is a
problem worth their thinking about and that the solution is
international and requires interdisciplinary action.”

Cristol and Sharon Zuber are coordinators of the mercury s-GIG.
Zuber, a specialist in documentary films, teaches in the English
department and the Film Studies Program and directs the Writing
Resources Center. Cristol, an ornithologist, has been researching the
effects of mercury in wildlife for years, including a current study of
birds near particularly contaminated sections of the Shenandoah River
near Waynesboro, Va. The GIG had its genesis in a number of informal
connections with Zuber at the hub.

“Dan (Cristol) had worked with a student a couple of years ago who
did a documentary film about an endangered parrot in Puerto Rico,”
Zuber recalled. “He asked if I had a student who might be interested in
doing a documentary about the mercury issue up around Waynesboro. I
also happened to have, living with me last year for a year, Xiong Li, a
visiting scholar from Wuhan, China, and she was working with Mike
Newman at VIMS in environmental science and heavy metals.”

Newman is a professor of marine science at VIMS—the Virginia
Institute of Marine Science. He has written the book on
ecotoxicology—literally. Its title is The Fundamentals of Ecotoxicology.
Newman’s a guy you’d want involved in any mercury group. Meanwhile, Liz
Budrionis, a neuroscience major, began working with Zuber on a video
about Cristol’s group studying mercury in birds in the Shenandoah. The
thematic tentacles of mercury were beginning to spread.

First it was an e-GIG

The group coalesced last winter in the form of an exploratory
inquiry group, or e-GIG, and rapidly expanded to include faculty and
students from a number of departments and disciplines all working on
mercury or interested in incorporating mercury into their work. Kelly
Joyce, from sociology, and Monica Griffin, from the Sharpe Community
Scholars Program, got involved early. So did Kris Lane, an associate
professor of history who has done considerable work on small-scale gold
mining throughout South America, operations that often leave a legacy
of mercury pollution from the extraction process.

Other faculty members saw the potential to incorporate mercury into
their own work. Elizabeth Mead, an assistant professor in art and art
history, began attending the early e-GIG meetings and is now arranging
for a Muscarelle Museum exhibition of some of the “Minimata” works of
W. Eugene Smith. Smith’s photo essays of people suffering from the
effects of mercury poisoning around Minimata, Japan, helped to bring
international attention to the dangers of industrial mercury pollution.

“When we got together, we realized that half a dozen faculty or more
here are already working on some aspect of mercury,” Cristol said.
“Already, mercury is planted all over campus—conceptually! So what
we’re going to do with the s-GIG is to put it into the curriculum
through three different means.”

He said s-GIG members expect to develop eight new courses
incorporating mercury, either as a case study or in a thematic sense.
Mead is developing one such mercury-themed class, Heavy Metal and the
Delta Blues: Sculpture and the Global Environment. Students in the
course will create original works in response to two case studies—one
involving mercury pollution and the second on the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina.

“It is a way for students to begin to understand that there are
things that art can communicate that can’t be communicated in any other
way,” Mead explained. “Of course I have nothing against formalist
approaches that value ‘art for art’s sake,’ but as artists we can also
use our distinctive ways of looking and seeing to position ourselves as
artists within the world and the challenges facing the world.”

The second strategy for getting mercury into the curriculum, Cristol
said, is for members of the s-GIG to incorporate a mercury element into
existing classes, using it as a case study. “I teach introductory
biology, and we always spend a week or two talking about cycles of a
pollutant through the globe,” he said. “That pollutant can be mercury
now. I need a fresh example anyway, so all the students taking freshman
biology now will spend a week or two studying how mercury moves around
the globe instead of how, say, nitrogen moves around the globe.”

Cristol says the third way will probably reach the most people. You might call it mercury evangelism.

“We’re going to offer small stipends to faculty to attend a two week
seminar, probably in the summer, to work with a member of the s-GIG to
work up an example using mercury for their class,” he explained.
“Without this little incentive, they’re probably not going to go out
and learn a whole new field just to get a new example. They’re probably
going to use their old example. We want to encourage them to work with
one of us to add a case study to their class involving mercury.”

‘Almost sinful’

As members of the s-GIG work to incorporate mercury into various
aspects of research and scholarship, Newman, the VIMS ecotoxicologist,
is adding an international element to his Fundamentals of Ecotoxicology
course, a refinement that is “so easy, it’s almost sinful,” he said.

He is working out the details of an exchange program with Xiong Li,
the Chinese scientist who roomed with Sharon Zuber. Xiong has since
returned to her university in Wuhan and has been teaching a class in
ecotoxicology, using not only Newman’s textbook but also the Blackboard
materials and PowerPoints.

“We’re going to be teaching parallel courses in both places so we’ll
have a common background when we do the exchange,” Newman explained.

The two ecotoxicology groups will have opportunities to get together
twice. In February, as the plans currently stand, Xiong Li will bring a
group of Chinese students to William and Mary. In June, Newman and
Zuber will journey to China with a number of students, a reciprocal and
mutually beneficial exchange.

“We’ll be able to develop the same background in the same context
for these students and we’ll be able to do a dialogue of
compare-and-contrast, which should be wonderful,” Newman said. “China
is the United States after the Second World War as far as the economic
boom is concerned. So it’s going to be fascinating for them to see what
the U.S. is doing and visa versa.

“Mercury is something that people envision right now as localized.
That just simply is not true,” he said. “Mercury because of its release
with burning fossil fuels—especially coal—is dispersed very, very
widely. It no longer is something where you can point to a pipe and say
there’s where the mercury is coming from. You look all around you and
whether or not you’re standing in China or Williamsburg, Virginia, it’s
all the same global process. I would say that a good portion of it
comes from China, but you can’t point the finger with no shame at all
at China and say, it came from you, because I could get up from my desk
right now and look out my window and there’s a coal-fired plant.”